Is anyone else on the brink of losing total interest in G4?

[lostpony]

... flanderized ...

flanderization

As in Ned Flanders?  Time for Re-Neducation, let the hooks do their work!

Seriously though, I have no idea what flanderization is.

I agree with you guys as to the factual parts, but somehow G4 pony stuff especially printed on cheap child's party supplies and as plushes just spins my top and in the show they actually move around so I don't care if it's crud, I want more.  Is that bad?

I'd like it to get better, and some of the upcoming episodes sound like they're mostly lame but I'm happy there is more and more coming anyway.  Though if they quit now, my story could define cannon forever meaning I could steal all the magic in Equestria and the Princesses would be my slaves.  Since none of you want to take it from me, I could grow fat and lazy too.  But, they all work for Hasbro so they get wasted off in accordance with your complaints.  Bet they'd rather be mine.

[Baby Sugarberry]

I'll always be of the opinion that "if you enjoy it, and your enjoyment isn't a detriment to others, go for it." Doesn't matter what you enjoy really in your own time and space, nor do you need someone else's approval on your preferred hobby.
 

[cacopony]

I am. It started because they would keep releasing the same mane six in the waves and add a few more ponies. But I was kinda okay with it, it meant that I could buy more of the non mane six by giving me more time to save for them (unlike monster high that released new dolls every time) But to my country the only ponies that arrived were the mane six...wave after wave, the same 6...

I been doing my collection thanks to the flea markets that receive ponies from different waves. Recently I bought 3 pearlized brushables for the price of one pony of local stores from malls etc...

But then I learned about the reboot ponies. I don't feel they are accurate and in fact i think they look ridiculous with their mouth open like that, not only that but as far as i've seen they are just the mane six.

The only good thing for me out of this is that I may be able to focus on getting the ponies that never arrived to my country, such as star swirl ( :'0 ) and others. I like doing customs so I don't mind buying the mane six for that but it's still idiotic to do what is being done to mlp

To make things worst when g4 started I made a comic joking about this issue. The comic started with a person interviewing someone who's grandmother collected g4 ponies and passed them to their granddaughter. after showing the g4 collection the girl went on and showed the reporter a collection on "g5s". The had HUGE eyes, small bodies and long legs... I assumed it would happen but not so soon!

[Stormness_1]

I loved G4 when there were lots of characters and lines in the early days, and then it petered out, but I still picked up whatever new releases came about, but with the reboot I have this feeling like when you finally finish a game but lose your save file - you have to start again, and I'm not a fan of that AT ALL. I'm not going to be starting again. I already have too many doubles of the mane six, and while I have a reboot Twi that I got for Christmas, I haven't deboxed her, and I probably won't. When I go back to collecting, it will be completing the earlier gens only unless a new brushable generation with new characters comes out. So I'll hang onto my current G4 collection, but I won't be adding any new G4.5 ponies to it.

[Taffeta]

Those of us who are tired of G4 need to remember that it's targeted at an age group that renews and there are new youngsters picking up all the time and S6 is a good example of where we feel the story needs to move a lot further along but a new viewer especially one who's 5 or 8 needs to get introduced without needing to have seen all previous episodes.

I have to disagree on this point; we were kids with G1, and G1 was marketed to us as a collection. We were encouraged to collect them all and 'step into the world of MLP'. We didn't need to come in at the beginning to be able to do that. Each year was marketed individually and it wouldn't take a lot for the animation to do what G1 did, or the comics to do the same and broaden the castlist a little. Though I think the characters are there, just not generally in brushable production.

I don't think the kids have changed all that much, either. I have seen kids in the toy aisle going painstakingly through rows of Rainbow Dash for a different character, or telling their parents quite specifically which pony they want - not just any pony, but that pony, for a specific reason. The thing is that Hasbro can use the excuse of renewal to basically not exert too much imagination. I am sure it saves them a lot of money on production to churn out the same pony over and over again. Yes, some kids will buy more than one of a character they like, and sometimes new kids will get into the show and buy the mane six that are out at any one time, but we all know that the ones left on the shelf unsold from three or five lines before are the mane six ones. The different or new characters are generally the ones that go first.

Kids would definitely welcome variety. They just aren't given enough of it.

I loved your story about the pony and the kid, by the way. That is what MLP is all about, rather than us and what we think

I also wonder why people automatically assume there will be a G5. It's better not to assume anything. We didn't know after G1 that G2 would happen. G2 was such a problem for Hasbro G3 was a pleasant surprise. Odd things happened at the end of G3, then G4 happened. But none of those were ever for sure going to happen. Hasbro may decide that MLP ends with this franchise. We should not expect G5. If it happens, fine, but it's only with hindsight that we have this progression from G1-G4, and there's no telling what a toy manufacturer might decide.

[MJNSEIFER]

lostpony, Flanderization is when writers take a particular trait their characters have and over exaggerate it rather than have it be one of their traits and keep the characters more balanced.  It is indeed named after Ned Flanders, I think it was his religiousness that got over exaggerated.

It's like how in season 1 and 2 Pinkie Pie was always the fun loving party pony, but you could tell that there was more to her than that, she was shown to be quite intelligent at times (if she has her moments now too, then fair enough) and be quite perceptive of things, whereas she was used more for random jokes and very little else in season 3 and 4 at least (so much so, I joked that Twilight Sparkle sent the real Pinkie to the Mirror Pool by mistake).  Or how Princess Twilight Sparkle was always a book smart egghead, but she didn't need to do everything in charts all the time, like she seems to now.

People will always have their own view on who's been Flanderized and who hasn't though.  I still don't think the Friends characters were really Flanderized that much, if at all, aside from Joey's stupidity being inconsistent, but there are people who would disagree with me.

[Leave a Whisper]

Those of us who are tired of G4 need to remember that it's targeted at an age group that renews and there are new youngsters picking up all the time and S6 is a good example of where we feel the story needs to move a lot further along but a new viewer especially one who's 5 or 8 needs to get introduced without needing to have seen all previous episodes.

I disagree. The other three MLP gens thrived on diversity. Kids of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s didn't need to have 100 different Fireflys, or 40 different Kimonos, or a million Ivys. Yes there were some re-releases (not counting the Bore Core) but not that many that you'd get sick of seeing them.

A kid could come into the cartoons at roughly any point and in fact most cartoons let a kid do that nowadays too.


Transformers brings back fan favorites, but they space them out and make plenty of new characters for each new show. Plus they don't force fans to buy packs with Optimus and Megatron JUST to get the new robot.

I could walk into a store right now and see Optimus and Bumblebee and Galvatron and also see Twinferno, Mindwipe and Skullcruncher.

This is what MLP needs to be again. A healthy mix of fan favorites, new characters and toyline characters.

[LadyMoondancer]

As a collector I prefer variety, but obviously G4 has been successful doing what they're doing.  MLP has surpassed their expectations.  And despite what bronies would like to think, it's not because of them.  Small children (or to be more accurate the parents of small children, lol) are the main drivers of MLP sales.

[MJNSEIFER]

Yeah, I'm fine with the show having a "Mane Cast", but the toylines should have more diversity, and they can easily put toys in the background/make background ponies toys as well as do an episode that introduces a new character/toy.   My Little Pony Tales had main characters, and My Little Pony and Friends and G3 My Little Pony at least had characters who appeared more than others (G1 started having no main cast at all, but at some point certain ponies were used a decent amount, weren't they?) yet they still had a variety of toys in both G1 and G3, an very rarely did a pony duplicate.  The Core 7 era was when MLP lost variety, and while My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic brought it back for a while, and maybe keeps bringing it back every now and then, it also lacks the variety.

Also in terms of "coming in any time", I think both storyline driven and stand alones can work for a children's show.  FiM did quite well at doing both in season 1 and season 2, as there was a decent amount of continuity, but you didn't have to know too much if you were just settling in.  Most of the continuity came from the development anyway, with the odd thing being learned by previous episodes.

[lostpony]

Taffeta and Leave a Whisper:  Thanks to you both for responding to my paragraph.

However in both cases I think your response seems to address the issue of overproducing the same toys which i agree with but I was referring to the show itself and the way it never seems to escape an "introductory" feel, like it's stuck in one place and doesn't really move forward into more complex storylines that follow from something that happened before.  It's shown the capacity to do that, but it usually doesn't and the plot of most episodes tend to be pretty close to the starting point.

This opinions expressed in this thread do highlight that there are two distinct issues here:  the toys, and the show.  While of course are tied together they are two different things and people are more focused on one or the other...they both need to be well done or people start to lose whatever it was they loved about them.

G1 kept fresh by having lots of different ponies, yes, also it was simply shorter than G4.  G3 didn't even have to put out a regular show on schedule as it was all movies.  G4 endeavors to introduce a set of characters then move them forward through life and as that time runs longer and longer, it gets harder to both move them forward and not leave new viewers behind.  That's the challenge I was pointing out:  if any episode was too dependent on things before it, a small kid getting put in front of it for the first time would have trouble understanding what's going on.

I can't agree more as to the variety of the toys.  The show has been so far ahead of the toys in new and different characters and when the flawed and boring brushables were getting new sculpts I was so excited that things were going to be different, but that difference hasn't really turned out the way I was hoping for.  I really can't grasp how the blind bags can have so many diverse characters made so similar in shape to the show and seems like so many poses (when they are actually only a few poses but done pretty well) and not bring that accuracy and variety to the larger toys.  It's just odd.

MJNSEIFER:  thanks for explaining that to me.  Even in the case of Ned Flanders himself I think they did explore a depth of his charcter even though his shtick was narrow and redundant and yes, I too wondered if the real Pinky got eliminated in the mirror pool episode.

[Jorgito93]

Taffeta and Leave a Whisper:  Thanks to you both for responding to my paragraph.

However in both cases I think your response seems to address the issue of overproducing the same toys which i agree with but I was referring to the show itself and the way it never seems to escape an "introductory" feel, like it's stuck in one place and doesn't really move forward into more complex storylines that follow from something that happened before.  It's shown the capacity to do that, but it usually doesn't and the plot of most episodes tend to be pretty close to the starting point.

This opinions expressed in this thread do highlight that there are two distinct issues here:  the toys, and the show.  While of course are tied together they are two different things and people are more focused on one or the other...they both need to be well done or people start to lose whatever it was they loved about them.

G1 kept fresh by having lots of different ponies, yes, also it was simply shorter than G4.  G3 didn't even have to put out a regular show on schedule as it was all movies.  G4 endeavors to introduce a set of characters then move them forward through life and as that time runs longer and longer, it gets harder to both move them forward and not leave new viewers behind.  That's the challenge I was pointing out:  if any episode was too dependent on things before it, a small kid getting put in front of it for the first time would have trouble understanding what's going on.

I can't agree more as to the variety of the toys.  The show has been so far ahead of the toys in new and different characters and when the flawed and boring brushables were getting new sculpts I was so excited that things were going to be different, but that difference hasn't really turned out the way I was hoping for.  I really can't grasp how the blind bags can have so many diverse characters made so similar in shape to the show and seems like so many poses (when they are actually only a few poses but done pretty well) and not bring that accuracy and variety to the larger toys.  It's just odd.

MJNSEIFER:  thanks for explaining that to me.  Even in the case of Ned Flanders himself I think they did explore a depth of his charcter even though his shtick was narrow and redundant and yes, I too wondered if the real Pinky got eliminated in the mirror pool episode.

Continuity doesn't stop a kids show from being great and successful.I mean, Steven Universe is one of the best cartoons of these last years, and it has success while having a storyline that advances and changes the status quo a lot(when CN puts in on instead of Teen Titans Go *sigh*), though it doesn't have a toyline to sell (even if it honestly could).

[lostpony]

Sure.  I was just addressing what frustrates me (and that some others have complained about) and why that has to be balanced with making sure every episode can stand alone too. 

Not drawing conclusions as to the thing as a whole.

[SummerSkye]

There are actually a lot of nice looking ponies in the game and the blind bags. I would LOVE to see them as brushables! My Walmart has had the same few Pinkie Pies since before Xmas... They might have added a few pearly ones actually but, come on. Just... 

[Gusty]

I must kinda agree. I still like G4, but lack of focus on brushables a bit annoys me. It's cool that they make blind bags and action figures, but MLP has always been mainly about brushables and I would like if there would be more characters made into brushable figures. I also miss the old real pony like designs.

[Al-1701]

Hasbro's current strategy is successful only because the show has been popular and penetrated deep into popular culture.  I think the entire generation will collapse quickly after Friendship is Magic is concluded (and possibly a reason they keep renewing it).

The thing is, why is EVERYTHING Mane 6?  Why can't we have a different set of characters be the stars of the movie?  Same thing for the comic and Guardians of Harmony.  It would make so much sense.  It would mean more variety on the shelves (especially with the movie).  Can Hasbro seriously not create new ponies outside those from the ground the Almighty Faust smote?